That’s my second LD. I was so tired and sleepless by reaching the compo deadline that I forgot to make a post about my entry.  I made a kind of shooter, a ‘kind’ because you will control a small army of archers and catapults. All graphic was made from simply unity3d primitives. So here it is :

Defend Your Kingdom

You are in times when legends are reality, your medieval companions and yourself have to defend the realm from evil.
The earth cracked open and demons started to crawling to the surface.
You and group of knights you’re commanding are bounded to stop them.

Protect the kingdom from demons coming forth! Keep them beneath the surface so that no poor soul get devoured!

Your army:

Hordes of demons trying to reach the surface:

Single catapult witch archer:

I appreciate any rates and comments!

link: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=29762

Tags: compo, game, unity, unity3d

Sup guys, just made a quick trailer video about our game, Hell Hole. It’s a game about moles and a cowboy and moles….

It has a kinda bad quality, but at least it shows what the game’s all about… just watch the damn trailer…

If this trailer made you horny for our game, PLAY IT HERE…! CLICK THIS LINK RIGHT NOW! THIS IS AN ORDER! DON’T YOU GET IT?! I’M STILL WAITING YOU TO CLICK THE LINK! THERE IS NO TIME TO READ ALL THE CRAP I’M SAYING! JUST CLICK THE DAMN LINK ALREADY! OH GOD, WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME…? ALL I WANT IS YOU TO CLICK THE LINK BUT NOOOOO, YOU JUST HAVE TO STARE… AND DO… NNNNOTHING! WHAT WAS I EXPECTING ANYWAYS….? IT’S NOT LIKE YOU WOULD CLICK THE LINK…. I WAS A FOOL FOR BELIEVENG THAT SOMEONE LIKE YOU WOULD DO SOMETHING AS SIMPLE AS CLICKING THE DAMN LINK! YEAH! THAT’S RIGHT! M-MAYBE… IT’S ME…? DID I DO SOMETHING BAD TO YOU? DID I SAY SOMETHING BAD TO YOU? NO! YOU HAVE NO REASON-I REPEAT-NNNNO REASON TO NOT CLICK THE LINK! SO JUST CLICK THE LINK! PLEASE! I’M BEGGING YOU! CLICK IIIIIT! YOU. HAVE. TO. CLICK. THAT. LINK. I’M SERIOUS NOW… CLICK IT! I’M NOT KIDDING! CLICK THE LINK! …Seriously though, click the link.

I’ll post more about the game… later… if I don’t get too lazy. By-bye!

This was my first Ludum Dare and I’m pretty happy with the outcome, my game!

Click to play!

Click to play!

Tools

Unity
SFXR
Google!

Development Process

I started off with an idea to burn away at a layered sphere. Not sure why, or what would happen.

I made a geosphere in Max, added a Shell moodier to give it some thickness and then used Explode to break it into around 320 chunks which would all have their pivot point at the centre of the sphere.



Once that was done I imported it to Unity and added a bunch of mesh colliders to the chunks and got a camera rotating around it.

I still didn’t know what the game was going to be at this point as I didn’t go in with a plan

At one point I considered doing some kind of 3D Minesweeper game based on the surface chunks and the layers below, but then I realised I didn’t actually like Minesweeper and I’ve never managed to complete a level of it, so that idea was out the window!

Instead, I got Raycasting working and decided whatever you clicked would get destroyed!



One thing I’ve learned about action/arcade games it that MORE IS BETTER! So I duplicated the sphere layer twice and nested them within each other and make them all rotate separately and at different speeds.

At this point I started thinking about colours. I noticed I’d used a pastel kinda colour already, so I googled “pastel colours” and found this:



And there was my colour scheme! From here on I started just colour-picking from this image and based all the colours on this.

Next I added the enemies, ‘cus every arcade game needs stuff to shoot at! I added pulsing rings to the enemies so that they were easier to find amongst all the rotating stuff!



Now I had some enemies, I made them shoot at the player. How do you make them hit the player form anywhere on a sphere? Make the player another sphere! So i added the purple shield sphere which the whole game takes place inside and made this the player, with health.

Next, I added the “shoot everything on a layer to blow it up” mechanic and finally I was starting to have a game coming together!



And there you go! I had a game!

Finally I added a menu/level loading system and made four more levels.

Job done. My first Ludum Dare was over and I had a completed, totally playable game. And I’d had the most fucking fun I’d ever had making games!

Good

• Fun game!
• Easy to pick up (I think this helps when people are playing loads of games to rate and they probably don’t always give each game much time)
• Straight into the gameplay. No intros, no tutorials, no novels to read before shooting stuff (I have a short attention span!)
• Cool, low-tech visuals – I’m a programmer not an artist. If I had to draw or model anything beyond a sphere, it would have been crap. Stumbling on the low poly/shading visual style helped me out a lot here!
• Really nice explosion effect (total accident!). I think this helped get peoples attention in the animated gifs and it looks cool in-game. I got a lot of comments about this. It was another accident too I was going for a different explosion effect but messed up and got this one instead, which looked way cooler
• No plan! I don’t really do planning. I always dive in by throwing a bunch of objects into a scene and just playing around. There’s only 48 hours, why waste some of them planning to make a game that you have no idea if it’ll be fun or not anyway?
• Clear and simple instructions on screen at-all time. Again, when people are playing through a bunch of LD games, I think making it as easy as possible for everyone to get up and playing ASAP is super important.
• A menu! This sounds obvious but it was the one thing I made a conscious effort to get in. About 4 hours from the end I made a menu scene and handled all the level loading from the menu and in-level too. It’s the kind of thing that’s easily forgot until it’s too late

Bad

• Audio – Simple sound effects and no music! I have no idea how to make music on a computer, so there’s no music. This is something I plan to start working on for the next LD 😉 Like 99% of everyone else, I used the awesome SFXR for the sound effects.
• Not enough levels. This was down to time, I made the first level during the development of the game and the last 4 levels in the last 10 mins before I submitted 😉 I wanted it to be quite easy initial but the last level be pretty tough as there were only gonna be 5 levels in the LD version. Not sure how this worked out. Some people commented it was a bit too hard, but it seemed fine for others. I think this is pretty usual though. It’s one of the hardest things I find bout games dev though, balancing a game you’ve spent way more time with/playing than anyone else yet still trying to see the game through “fresh eyes”.
• Naming my game after the theme. I didn’t even think about this until afterwards, but calling it “Beneath The Surface” was pretty stupid as it doesn’t stand out and makes finding any references to my game pretty tough!

Future

• (Done!) Controller support.
• (Done!) Change the firing mechanic. A few people commented that it seemed pointless having to hold down the fire button all the time. They’re right. I’m gonna try adding an energy bar that drains as you fire so you have to balance killing enemies with burning surfaces to discover them… and ties in with the next point…
• (Done!) Boost! I’ll be adding a boost ability which will let you orbit around the planet faster to get to the other side etc. This will tie in tie in with the new energy bar. Boosting will also drain your energy, so you’ll need to balance firing with boosting and watching your energy.
• More levels, more mechanics. I’m still not sure yet if the game can have enough depth to warrant becoming a full game, so I’ll need to think of some new gameplay mechanics!
• (Kinda done!) Optimise for mobile. If it does become a full game, I’ll need to optimise it for Mobile as 600+ colliders in a scene doesn’t cut it on older devices. I already started this and came up with the following: Instead of rotating all the objects and their colliders (can be around 6-900) I split each surface into three separate layers and gave each one a separate camera which only renders that layer. I then composite the three camera images which results in the same view as the original one camera system, BUT: I can then move the CAMERAS around instead of the objects so that there’s no overhead from moving the physics colliders. This is ace and did the trick, I got a stable framerate on an older, low spec iPhone which wasn’t possible with the one camera way.

Here’s a sceenshot that hopefully explains better how it works.



Now I’ve proved this works, I’ve put it all back to how it was (it makes level design etc more difficult) so I can just get on with developing the game further now and worry about converting it if I have a good game at the end!

•  Sexyness: bloom/glow, effects, camera shake. All the stuff that’s awesome at making games seem and feel way more fun than they are!!

Next LD

Same approach: Dive in, no plan, have fun and make something I think is cool!

Hopefully I’ll have learned some music-making basics by then so I can have a good at making a naff music track!

CYA NEXT TIME!

Click to Play my Game!

Hello!

I’ve just finished the Web version of The Monastery! Enjoy!

Play The Monastery

The Monastery is my entry to LD #29. It is a party-based tactical RPG with approximately 1 hour playtime. The Monastery features 4 character classes, 9 unique monster types, unfolding story, spellcasting and three levels packed full of encounters, secrets and mystery.

Not exactly by popular demand but hey. I doubt that’s a disqualifying feature, given it’s one line of code, and is  totally optional! 😛

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=1508

The Delve postmortem.

First off, thanks so much to those who played Delve and left such nice comments and feedback, I truly appreciate it. And also thanks to everyone for making such fun and creative games! Very inspiring as always.

The Concept
I struggled a bit with this theme and landed on a simple rummaging “down the rabbit hole” searching game that I wasn’t too excited about. Not a great way to start a game jam. It was a toss up between that and a wallpaper removal simulator, which I really hope someone ended up making. The direction I ended up taking at least let me practice some animation which is something I love doing.

The Visuals
This part of the project took about 95% of the time. For example I spent all day Saturday just on the title screen and half of Sunday on the end screen. In hindsight that was probably not the way to go since it left hardly any time to make the actual game, but I had a great time animating those parts and that’s what counts, right?

The Gameplay
Ha, not sure this section counts. I literally spent about two hours before the deadline scrambling to connect the title and end screens together. Since each letter of the title represents a world and had an animated looping component, I simply grabbed those loops and threw them on some backgrounds with a mask to reveal the world underneath. This ended up making the gameplay very shallow and for sure the weakest part of the piece.

The Audio
Most of the music was created Friday night while concepting. I used Figure on my phone to create multiple loops that I piece together later in Sound Studio 4. For the most part tho I don’t really think the music fits super great with the visuals. Ambient sound would probably have been nicer. The sfx that are there were created quickly with the amazing online tool as3sfxr.

The Time Management
I’ve recently started using a task tracking software called Tyme and used it for LD29. It’s kind of interesting to do this and would for sure recommend it. I found it helped keep me focused and minimized distractions. Here’s where I netted out:
Concepting / 1hr:43min
Audio / 2hr:18mn
Programming {includes design + animation} / 17hr:43
Submitting / 23mn
For a total of 22hr07mn

The Future
I’m not sure if I’ll make Delve more than it currently is, which is an unintentionally poor knock-off of the amazing pieces by Vectorpark like Windosill. I have several other game ideas that I may merge with it to give it its own unique voice so it can stand apart. But before that, I need to finish production of my miniLD48 game, Lucky Lighter, which should be done soon-ish. I’ll be periodically publishing dev updates on the twitter if interested. Thanks again for looking!

I’ve uploaded a post-compo version of my game to GameJolt. I’ll be updating it routinely, hopefully. It depends on whether or not I can stay motivated.

GameJolt Link

Compo Link

Tags: gamejolt, javascript, phaser, post-compo

(some of this is copied from my blog article here)

My son (9 year old Oscar) and I participated in our second Ludum Dare Game Jam, #29, and it was, once again, a really rewarding and insightful experience.

Oscar used Scratch for developing his game (the new web-based version) and I used Flash, FDT, Citrus Engine, Illustrator, Photoshop, Audition, GarageBand, and Dragon Bones.

First, Take Aways

As with the last game jam, we learned a ton!

Oscar learned that you aren’t really done when you think you are done. This is especially true I think in any art of programming endeavor. There are bugs, refinements, and ways to make things smoother and more efficient. It’s a good lesson.

I also noticed Oscar having a bigger awareness of the things needed for a game to be playable – like a story, a clear goal, instructions. I love seeing how his knowledge is growing just from seeing others play his creation.

For me, I learned that it’s good to let go of the desire to have a unique idea, and instead focus on having a good idea. This may not be the case all the time, but starting with a good idea, and flushing it out seemed to lead to something pretty unique anyway.

This second gam jam continued to reinforce how awesome I think this approach to anything is: given a ridiculously short amount of time, we were able to create things that would probably feel much more daunting if we had wanted to make them over weeks or months of time. When you don’t have time to really think too much or second-guess design ideas, approaches to problems, or adding extra features or details, you just plow through and your mind seems to automatically prioritize the right things and in a pretty good order.

The Games

Oscar’s Game: Pixel Bat Attack (when you get there, click on the “Web” link)

My Game: The Vole Beneath (when you get there, click on the “Web” link)

Time Lapse

Oscar’s Game Time lapse Video

My Game Time lapse Video

Friday

We both dove in and started thinking of concepts. Oscar had an idea right away and started making his game within the first 20 minutes. I tried to follow the process I did last time, where I give myself 2 hours to come up with ideas, then sketch, and then start building a game.

That didn’t work out so well.

I generated a lot of ideas, but could really find one that connected with me. I think I was really putting myself under pressure to deliver something unique and different and nothing cliché and that really made it extra difficult. For us on the set coast, the competition started at 6pm on Friday and by the end of the night, I still had not chosen an idea.

And that added more stress and pressure to the situation.

But the time Oscar went to bed, he had about two solid hours of developing his game, which is great! I realized later that I should really follow his lead, and if I see that I am stuck, I should just dive in and start making something, anything, because this can sometimes really help to get me out of a stuck process.

I went to bed in hopes that my mind would figure something out magically by morning.

It didn’t.

Saturday

On Saturday morning, I picked one idea and started to put it together to see where it would lead. The idea was that you control a magnet under the surface and there is a piece of metal on top that you have to get over obstacles and challenges to reach the final goal. I wasn’t sure what the goal was, or any of the other details, but I put together a rudimentary version of it.

Meanwhile, Oscar was cranking along. He had this cave explorer concept and some bats that shot acid already working. It was neat to see how quickly he had envisioned an idea and worked toward realizing it. He really gave himself no pressure and just enjoyed the process. Something I needed to remember!

Oscar recorded sounds using his voice and then found a little wooden squeaky bat (or bird) sound maker that worked perfect for his bat sounds.

We had a few things to juggle Saturday, and that added to the pressure because I knew we wouldn’t have a full day to work on things. I wasn’t feeling my prototype with the magnet and as we headed out the door, I told Oscar as much.

I told him that originally I had a different idea that I thought I liked but didn’t feel very unique – this gopher or mole or some animal that lives beneath the soil and bumps the ground to get a nut or something. I ditched it because it just felt too simple, and I figured everyone would be doing a game about being underground, so it wouldn’t be too original.

Oscar liked it. He immediately latched onto the idea that the nut could go in a hole for the mole to get. It all made sense!

After talking with Oscar about it, I realized that I should just shoot for something fun and playable. I realized that I was placing undo pressure on myself to create something original and unique when having anything done in this short amount of time is the real goal.

Thanks Oscar!

It was now Saturday night and I started to work on this new idea.

Sunday

The deadline for the 48-hour competition is Sunday at 6pm. I dint know if I could get there, but I knew Oscar was finished so at least one of us would.

I was really excited now because I had a solid direction (thanks to Oscar) and had the beginnings of the concept working. A lot of my time was sunk into trying to figure out how to make the terrain move by bumping it from underneath. I not-so-quickly researched terrain generation code, different algorithms for drawing smooth lines through given points, ways of creating physics bodies that had angled edges. None of it seemed to work for me.

This is when I wish I had some knowledge of trigonometry. Or the ability to retain it.

I ended up really hacking together this approach where the terrain is actually a bunch of little blocks that I shift vertically, and that for any slice that I shift up, I shift its adjacent slices up a fraction of that so it creates a sort of jagged ramp.

It wasn’t pretty, but it sort of worked. But I wasn’t convinced. I wanted a really smooth surface for the ball to roll down so I got sucked in to searching again, trying to find some examples of the math I could use to create a smoother, rounded surface for each of these bumps. Dynamically.

So hours got sunk again trying things that didn’t work.

I finally gave up, stuck with my hacky solution and moved on.

I checked in with Oscar about submitting his game and if there was anything left he needed to do. I realized he didn’t have instructions or a story so I encouraged him to add those. And that’s when he realized he had some bugs.

Its hard to get a 9-year-old to shift from “I’m done” mode into “I have to add more stuff and fix bugs mode” but after some discussion (and convincing) Oscar dove back in to add a cool little story, instruction screen, and really persisted on tracking down and fixing the bugs that he found.

Go Oscar!

With an hour to spare, he submitted his game – he made the 48-hour deadline!

I would not. But that’s ok, because there is a 2-hour deadline (mainly for teams and with slightly different rules) and so I aimed for that and kept plugging away.

I jumped into artwork now. This was getting really fun. And with only a few hours I rushed through and created a vole (what? they’re cute!) and walnut and terrain. I really plowed through this all and got a lot done in a short amount of time.

Monday

The tricky part about missing the 48-hour deadline is that it means you have to finish things up on Monday. I had this cold that was also brewing over the weekend (probably due to stressing about the gam jam!) so it was not an idea situation on any front.

I continued to hone the artwork and animate the vole character. This was really fun and I got to learn how the Dragon Bones extension for Flash works. It let me create a bunch of parts for the vole and move them around to create different poses from those same parts. It really makes things efficient because instead of having a lot of different images for each frame of animation, you just have these few parts and a skeleton that animates under the surface (hey, that’s the theme for the jam!).

Once I got all those parts wired up in the game engine, I created the title screen, win and lose screens, and wanted to get some music and sound in.

I plucked a few strings on my guitar, added some background strings from GarageBand, made a rolling sound for the walnut, and wired those in too.

I really had intended to have multiple levels but just couldn’t squeeze that in.

I submitted my game to the Jam with minutes to spare!

Thanks for reading and dont forget to check out the games:

Oscar’s Game: Pixel Bat Attack (when you get there, click on the “Web” link)

My Game: The Vole Beneath (when you get there, click on the “Web” link)

Until the next game jam everyone!

Now that some time has passed since Compo deadline, and that I have/am giving myself some time to myself, my mind’s a bit clearer to reflect on my submission, Eat Champ.

action! tragedy! romance!

Although I did have a lot of fun making it, I have mixed feelings on the final result; on one hand, to make the deadline I had to cut a lot of corners, leave out a lot of polish, and ultimately submit the game in a barely-finished state. Despite that, I’m still happy with the concept I wound up choosing, and the fact that I was able to stick to it until the end without it becoming a completely buggy mess is something I can be proud of, at least for my first LD! It’s also MUCH more playable than my previous (and first) game jam submission made some time ago (link if you’re curious), so I do feel that I’ve grown since then.

I’d like to spend a bit of time talking about the choice I made during development; for as crude as the game is, I actually did put a lot of thought into things! Even if the protagonist looks like this:

what a hottie

–GAMEPLAY STYLE–
Right from the get-go, I wanted to avoid making a game with level navigation. In order for that kind of game to be fun, it needs solid mechanics AND good level design. I learned the hard way during my first jam that getting mechanics down is hard enough, and this time I didn’t want to have to worry about rushing to create levels to properly express my game’s mechanics. I only wanted to have one thing to worry about: keeping the mechanics fun, and to have them at the forefront of the game.

Another thing about games with level navigation is that they’re only as long as how many levels they have. With that in mind, I opted for a arcade-style gameplay, which naturally gives itself high longevity without much extra development effort. As much as I like games with levels, I knew that if I did make one, it would have been really short. I also hoped that a mechanic-oriented game wouldn’t be as hurt by time-saving cuts, since as long as the basics are down, the game can still be playable without having to be fancy or complex.

I think the style of game I wound up choosing, a “multitasking” game (I’m not sure if this style of game has an official name, but that’s what I’m calling it), accomplished those goals well enough. But remember how I just said I wanted a game that would be fun with just the basics? Apparently, I didn’t, because the “basics” of my game were several interdependent actions working together in tandem (managing eating/chewing with lung & belly capacity, etc etc). This meant that even putting one “action” in the game meant that I had to prepare every other action that depended on it, which made things tricky to finish in a timely manner. I still think keeping the actions dependent on another is an important part to the game, but next time I’ll avoid designing a game like that to allow for more modular development that can be taken one step at a time.

–FLASHPUNK–
If I had made this game a year or two ago, I would have used pure Actionscript 3 in tandem with Flash Professional. Lately, though, I’ve tried to branch out to using game-oriented frameworks, and fell in love with FlashPunk (for the most part). I feel its best for tile-oriented games, but I still used it to make this one because of its high performance and how it saves time on tasks that can get annoying in pure AS3.

With that said, using it made me realize all of the things I take for granted when using AS3+Flash, like being able to animate a movie clip/entity in Flash and import it to my game. FlashPunk uses spritesheets instead of Flash symbols, so to get all of my Flash-drawn assets in (it’s a great drawing tool) I had to use a sprite-sheet generator (grapefrukt exporter) on everything. This was okay for the most part (and for the player’s head and hands, was actually better), but drawing and positioning status bars and everything was a bit tricky without feeling as closely connected to the display stage as I do with AS3. Most of those difficulties were due to inexperience, though, and working in an unfamiliar (but still effective) environment was a great learning experience that gave me a good idea of what I need to learn to make things easier for myself down the road.

–PRESENTATION–
There isn’t much to say here…I made some placeholder graphics, and they wound up being the final ones! How embarrassing. I was saving the task of better visuals & sounds for last, which I suppose was the right choice since those are the most expendable parts of a rapidly-developed game. But it still would have been nice if I gave myself a little bit of time making the game less ugly (I have to defend my decision to use floating hands, though, which is the go-to method to easily & effectively animate hand movement).

I did try to do a good job on the status meters, as I knew if I cheaped out on those no one would be able to tell that they were supposed to represent a digestive system. I also made sure to put key prompts in, and to provide visual feedback (usually by making things flash) when it was warranted to direct attention or inform the user that pressing a key did something (like digesting), or to differentiate similar-looking actions from each other (biting fills your mouth with food, but chewing doesn’t, so I did my best to animate the teeth differently for each action so players can tell the two apart. Did I accomplish that?).

So the effort I spent towards presentation was to help prevent the game from being too cryptic to play, which is nice and all, but I still think it’s confusing to play without reading the instructions beforehand. For instance, I insisted on assigning the “breathe in” action to pressing P and Q at the same time, and to forbid it while out of air if your mouth is full of food, but I didn’t give myself time to explain those rules visually as well as I did others. Especially since the game’s presentation doesn’t immediately liken it to a set of conventions (like a platformer), it was my job to properly express how to play it, and I failed to do a consistent job of that. But at least I did a better job of it then for my last game, though, which was even worse in that regard (hey, I guess I learned more than I thought from that game, heh).

–CUTS–
I’ll keep this part quick. It’s probably clear that there were supposed to be many more features/actions to the game, as it’s a bit simple the way it is now. Of course, by mid-afternoon on Sunday I started to get the feeling that I would have to start making some cuts (I really thought I was going to be okay for time until right about then). I never thought that I had too much planned to put in the game, but it’s surprising what a time limit can do to you! So I did what I could to finish only what I needed to keep the game playable. I also didn’t give myself time to properly balance the difficulty of what I had put in, so I’m sorry that the game is so hard. 😛 The lesson learned here is that it’s best to start simple and build from there, rather than having even moderately-sized plans that will likely end up cut.

—

Also, those who have played the game probably raised an eyebrow while noticing that it’s currently hosted as a file dump, rather on its own page or as a game portal submission. To be perfectly honest, I’m not all that comfortable submitting it to a public portal in its current stage; unless its understood as being a hastily-made LD submission, it’s really not ready for public consumption, and I think it would do me more harm than good. With that said, I fully intend to release an upgraded version of the game within the next few days (hopefully over the weekend [EDIT: haha yeah right], when LD buzz is still hot!!), while keeping the original version in it as “48-hour mode” or something, for context. It’ll probably be just an audio/visual update, but if I have time I might even add in some cut features!

So thanks for playing, and thanks to anyone who read all the way to the end of this rambling mess! I do what I do for folks like you. <3

PS: I will probably be **STREAMING** some submission surfing soon. I'll make another blog post about it, so sit tight! Because I know you all care immensely!!

From Below is my entry for LD29 jam rules, this is the second time I submited a game.
Play From Below here



The Concept

My first ideias were :

• Something with subways
• rats
• living in the swears/slums
• giant worms from beneath
• monsters that cause earthquakes

In the end I mixed the last two an I the main concept end up being “Giant worms cause earthquakes our job is to make them weak as possible”

Tools
I’m a programmer but I decided that I have to improve other skills (for this LD teh skill was just finish a game) so I choose Construct 2 to make the game so I wouldn’t have to program at all. For sound effects I picked sfxr and audacity and for music autotracker.py. For graphics Photoshop and Illustrator.

Graphics
Even before the compo started I knew I didn’t want to lose time trying to make art, so I used @KenneyWings assets pack

Mechanics

First the main character is the monster so the camera scrolls with him. In the begining there were walls in the sides of the level but that limited the movement to much so I remove the and let the player warp from on side to another. Since is a GIANT WORM moving beneath the surface I added diferent kinds off falling rocks that damage and throw the player down. To make the worm weaker so the earthquake would be weake as possible the player shoot lasers that can be upagraded with powerups, tha are not easy to get. When the worm hits the surface the highest earthquake is 10.0 and the lowest is 1.0.

The right and good things

• Construct2 and KenneyWings pack were my best decisions because I was able to focus on the gameplay and could easely make chances in the gameplay when I thougth something was worng
• The concept : I am really happy with the ideia I choose, with more effort it can be a much better game

The wrong and bad things

• The difficulty : the game is hard, is frustrating to die, the plataforms are to short. I need to pratice level design
• Only have one level, I wish I had time to make procedural generated levels
• Better feedbacks to the player

PS. Sorry for my english I need to pratice that too.

Everybody else seems to be making a post about their game, so I figured why not. I made a doom/wolfenstein like fps called Battle through Hell.

You can play and rate it Here

Original comic

Tags: Beneath the Surface, city, earth, seriously, skin, theme, under, water, y u no original

First off, I’m not even quite sure what I’m supposed to write here; I’m just assuming it’s supposed to be a summary of the process and what I learned…

My entry, Invasion from Below (http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=36095) was a 48-hour entry, which was actually completed in about 10 hours done live in my livesteam (www.livestream.com/stencyl).

As the livestream name indicates, the entire game was made with the game creator Stencyl. I’ve been using Stencyl almost since it came out (version 1.1), but there was a new API added in 3.1: the Image API. I guess it’s a pretty common thing in most game creation tools, but it’s brand new for Stencyl.

Thus, I decided that a 48-hour competition (in which I knew I’d only have a few hours of the 48) would be a great time to learn how to use it. Yeah, it was brilliant. I had many issues right from the start and actually drastically changed the game soon after starting (was originally going to use bullets, lasers, etc. from the buildings at the top of the screen instead of laying mini mines).

The idea for the game was born out of the desire to use the image API in a creative way. I originally thought of the enemies burrowing upwards and making tunnels behind them that would speed up enemies that followed after them. I quickly realized that was going to be too much with the time constraint, and the game you see is the result instead.

I also quickly realized that I was going to have to give up in certain areas in order to finish on time. Those areas were graphics and especially sound (there is no sound at all in the game).

In the end, I’m mostly pleased with the result. I do realize that I should have at least added sound effects (I REALLY suck at making music). Also, I really should have tried to take more time balancing the game. It’s really tough when you first play, but when you get down the system, it’s possible to get really far.

One thing I’m surprised with is the overall response from fellow LD players. I personally didn’t think my own game was that great in the end (for playing; the technical aspects behind it are pretty impressive since this is my first Image API application and got it all to work), but overall the comments have been decent. The lack of sound will definitely kill it in the end, but I’m glad that it seems like a lot of people are finding it to be a worthwhile game.

In the end, I only used three resources: Stencyl, Paint.NET, and, of course, some music to code to ;).

Will I ever do another LD? I tend to doubt it. This past weekend really wore me out; I’m still recovering from it. If the game does a lot better than I’m expecting it to though, I may just go ahead and try again, focusing on a simpler idea to pull off.

Thanks for reading!

Hi everyone

I guess it’s about time I share with you my thoughts on what went well and what went wrong, and what I can do with it the next time.
Also, I’ll try to give some insights on making games using Unity.
Sooo… What I attempted:

Motorbike shooter.
Core concept was plain and simple, but I kinda underestimated the task of writing bike physics. Ended up spending about 75% of my time on it 😀
Insight: learn to use Physics.SphereCast, that thing is a beast when working with physics-based stuff. It’s also a nice idea to write visualiser for those, or you can use/rewrite to C# mine: https://bitbucket.org/Taugeshtu/assistings

Level made out of tiles, which can be flipped, after what player can ride upside down. That went all right, I’m no stranger to per-entity variable gravity. One thing that I would’ve added if I had more time would be static batching. Another possible optimisation would be to have colliders only appear near bikes.
Insight: to toy around with gravity all you need is set your rigidbody not to use gravity, add a script to it with something like rigidbody.AddForce( -Vector3.up *Physics.gravity.magnitude, ForceMode.Acceleration ) in FixedUpdate() and you’re good to go. Another thing worth mentioning is: you don’t want to move/apply forces to physical objects inside Update(), and you don’t want to collect your input data inside FixedUpdate(). Grab the input in Update(), store it in private variables, apply in FixedUpdate(). That’ll save you from several glitches

Art.
My usual art pipeline includes SketchUp for hard-surface and Sculptris for organics/textures. It served me well this LD, though I didn’t needed Sculptris this time around. Unfortunately, I don’t really have any insight for you on this side regarding unity.

That’s pretty much it as far as game goes, but there were several issues with my workflow as well I’d like to write down:
Sleep management. I think it would be ideal for me to wake up next time right when LD starts, so that I can have one sleep session and not be exhausted as I was this time.

I took some time to rough out the edges of Atomicle now that the compo is over, and I wanted to give everyone a chance at a more ‘full’ experience. A proper menu, fixed some bugs/gameplay, and added high scores.

(Note: The game isn’t designed to be ‘easy’ so don’t let the music fool you.)

The full latest update can be played here: http://www.lostautumn.net/atomicle and the original Ludum Dare version can still be found here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=34026

I also have a ‘postmortem‘ write-up of the game from start to finish, as well as some thoughts on my first experience with Ludum Dare, and you can read it at: http://blog.lostautumn.net

This has been a real treat, and I look forward to participating again in the next go-around. I’ve met a lot of awesome developers and played a ton of excellent games this past week. Keep up the great work!

That is our game.  NECRONOMICON

The epic story of Neko, the Guardian of Earth.

This time we try new challenges for us, like, put music in different places and do the transitions. Put a sound in everything. Made a game a little more complex. Bro… It was a intense Ludum Dare, with a lot of learning.

And we did it!

Of course, it had a lot of problems to solve… but for a 72h hour game (plus 72h to solve serious problems), we did it. Necronomicon is real and you can enjoy this game.

The plot is simple: you need save the world. To do this, you need to find four rings, they are the Key. BUT, not so simple, a lot of minions will try destroy The Altar, and release the monster. So save the altar! Kill the minions!!!
In the end, you need win the last fight, a Epic Battle!

old layout, play the game to see an awesome new ^^

But you also can explore the scenario, listen the songs,  all this was made for you

Enjoy!

The fellas who made this game:

Davi Santos – Code (He made the final animation, and all explosions)

Fernando Perazzoli – Art and Level Design

Fernando Scaff Moura – Game Design (he also do some art too)

Adalberto Rodrigues – Music and Sound Design

Tags: release

Lots of people are making their games with Unity. I like that. Unity is good, but unfortunately the web player is not fully cross platform. I run Linux, and I would like to play all your Unity games but there isn’t a Linux build =[

I’d like to see some more Linux builds for Unity games

PLAY

I was excited and nervous heading into this Ludum Dare, as usual. I was excited to see my jam group again, and to with Britt as my graphic artist since he’s been cranking out game projects like crazy for the last 4 months. He did an amazing job our Mini LD submission Terrarium, too. I always go into jams feeling nervous, too – nervous that as a programmer I won’t be able to deliver on the designs we come up with. Time pressure forces tough decisions, and some of my toughest calls during jams so far came while working on our most recent jam, Strider Submerge.

When the theme “Beneath the Surface” was announced, we kicked around a few ideas about being underground, underwater, or beneath the surface of someone’s psyche. The psyche idea was super interesting, but we ultimately decided that it was too abstract for a rapid prototyping exercise. Britt wanted to have something with an underwater bubble city. Having mostly programmed platformers so far, I wanted to expand a bit and try something top-down. Our first night’s build was a sort of shooter where the player commanded a submersible dome city covered in tentacles.

To drive home that you were a moving city, we thought it would be interesting to incorporate resources for the player to manage, including food, oxygen, and energy. We ended up simplifying the resources to only include energy (and health), and threw out the city idea entirely. One of the hold overs from that is that the healing items in the game are fish you have to catch by submerging into the ocean, which is kind of funny when you’re just a spaceship. We were left with a submersion mechanic that expressed the theme strongly enough for us to run with it.

The submersion mechanic itself was something we struggled to make relevant. Most enemies can’t submerge, and so their missiles won’t hit the player if he/she is submerged. We eventually changed mines so that the player could swim under them, and made coral pieces that would allow the player to fly over, but not through them. This worked pretty well with our energy resource limiting how long the player could stay beneath the surface. We also added submerging enemies that could follow the player as they tried to hide, which feels pretty interesting but caused a lot of problems.

We also wanted a reason for the player to kill the various enemies, since submerging and going right past them was a viable option. I’d never made anything resembling a skill/tech tree before, but that was just the thing that would make killing enemies and earning credits interesting. Unfortunately, most players never get to see the upgrade screen – the game has only one level and we had intended for upgrades to happen in-between missions.

The single level that made it into the game was a dummy run intended to demonstrate and test the various enemy behaviors. We had planned out at least 4 levels, but ran out of time before we could implement any of them. Since the one that remained was not really designed with care, it ended up being way too difficult. The tutorial levels preceding it were put in early, which I’m happy about. Unfortunately, the submersion tutorial level is the only place you’ll see the a bridge implemented because, again, we ran out of time to build levels. Part of this reason was performance issues…

When working with Flash, it’s tempting to use color tinting, alpha fading, and crazy particle effects. I worked with Britt previously on a game called Terrarium that made the same mistake – the game looked amazing for about 4 seconds before becoming incredibly choppy. Performance is a major issue in Flash, especially when constantly changing multiple levels of alpha for various actors. The diving enemies gave us a lot of problems. They were animated with the same splashing and color tinting effects as the player, which became an issue when 6 of them popped into the screen. On top of that, enemies would sometimes try to dive on top of coral. This wasn’t normally a problem, but when two pieces of coral are too close to one another to allow the ship to fit between, the ship gets stuck in a collision problem and crashes the game. A couple of methods were tried for detecting coral beneath the diving enemies, and eventually one worked well enough to prevent about 90% of these crashes.

Despite the problems we had, we ended up with a game that I like quite a bit. I enjoy the mechanic and feel like there might be something there. Also, I love that we got voiceover for the boss fight and menus. Will Bucknum nailed the ’80s action hero vibe we were going for. The controls are a bit off, though – I intended to use WASD and force-based movement, but eventually but forgot about that as the weekend marched along. I’ve been working to improve the Strider Submerge’s performance in a separate upload from that submitted for the jam, and intend to build out those levels too. Moving the upgrade screen to right after the tutorial also does a better job of showing off all the hard work I put into making that work, so if you get a chance check out the original upload as Strider Submerge, then go try my current build: Super Strider Submerge.

From one box to another, I present joyous news to all.

INTERNET PLAY FOR ALL!

A bug was found that prevented internet play from working.
We put said bug into a box.
This box was placed into the back of a truck.
This truck was placed precariously at the edge of a cliff.
The cliff was lined with TNT and subsequently detonated.

Play Box Simulator

To play Box Simulator over the internet, the PC hosting the game must have the port forwarded to it. Exactly the same if you use a torrent client or host your own Minecraft server.

I am led to believe this bug fix is acceptable and within the rules and guidelines of the competition. Please let me know if I am mistaken and I’ll move this build to another link.

I missed two Ludum Dare since the last time but thankfully I was able to took time to participate last week-end !

I understood the theme quite literally with a mining game. Snake Driller is a Sake-kindoflikebutnotsomuch mining game. You have to drill the deepest before the time’s up, sometimes going sideways to mine interesting blocks or dodge those you can’t drill. You can also buy upgrades for your drill in a store to drill more types of blocks or drill faster.

Download and rate it on its entry page.

WHAT WENT RIGHT

Idea.

Even if my idea isn’t original or creative at all, I got it pretty quickly, I liked it and in one hour after I started working on the game, I had a solid design document. It turns out it was simple enough for me to implement almost everything I had planned but also interesting enough to play.

Development.

The game is made with :

• CraftStudio, which makes things very easy especially since I have quite some experience with it.
• Daneel, my framework for CS which makes things even easier and faster.
• A simple leaderboard library I just implemented the week before.

So I didn’t had to invent anything or code complex stuff. The majority of the time spent on the game was actually implementing the game, either menu or gameplay.

The first day, I implemented the map generation and basic drilling gameplay. The second day I did all the menus, and the store.

What strikes me, thought was the crappyness of the code. It was sometimes odd to just copy and paste code rather than find a clever way to having it written in one place. Also I never refactored anything so the structure of the code and data may not be quite efficient (or even just right). I think that’s kind of expected for a jam game, but I hadn’t had this feeling before and that’s something that really surprised me.

Completeness.

The game is more than just one level with gameplay (those are fine, too !). It has intro screens, a main menu, other screens/menus for “tutorial” and leaderboard as well as an in-game menu and end screen.

It may be “wrong” for a jam game since all the time I spend on all that (most of the second day !) could have been used for much needed gameplay tweaks. But having a complete game is as much important and rewarding to me as having “only” slick gameplay, even for a game jam.

WHAT WENT WRONG

Time.

No one spent 48 hours on their games. I certainly didn’t since I only logged 16 hours of work (6h30 on saturday, 8h on sunday, 1h10 on monday night).

That’s very few hours, and almost 10 hours less than I worked the last time !

It really shows how much I am not good (and I don’t like) at “crunching” long hours in a row. The game would definitely have benefited of a few hours of polishing and gameplay tweaking.

On the other hand, creating a game of that completion in only 16 hours is quite a success. It really shows how much I improved at gamedev and how much the tools I used makes things easy and fast !

Balancing.

Due to the lack of time, the game is not balanced. It’s too easy since once you have the refinery (to gain time by mining oil) and the iron drill (to drill stone blocks), all you have to do is dodge the few obsidian blocks to spent money on more time or more speed (which only makes you encounter more oil (time) or gold).

Every time you buy an engine upgrade (to drill faster), the odds of the obsidian should increase while the odds of the gold and oil should decrease, in order to ensure that the player either run out of time, either can’t evade obsidian any more. It’s really too bad that’s I didn’t had the time to implement this since it’s really easy to do.

Message.

The first feedbacks shows that the drill may be difficult to control because you have to understand that you don’t directly control where the drill will go but which block will be drilled after the one currently being drilled. And this one isn’t where is the drill but next to it. This is shown in-game with the reddish and greenish squares next to the drill’s extremity but it’s not very clear, especially for people who quickly (or don’t) read the game’s description. I planed to have a drilling animation and a clear arrow to point where the drill will be but again, I didn’t spent enough time on gameplay to do this.

Also I forgot to write the controls on the in-game “How to play” screen, which didn’t helped people top find the store. You just have to press the Escape key to bring up the in-game menu with the store but it appears it’s not natural to everyone.

CONCLUSION

Overall, the game felt to me like a definite success ! I think it’s definitely better than the last one and I am confident the next one will be even better ! Improving at gamedev is what game jam are for after all.

If you are interested about the sources you can check them out over at GitHub. Or if you have CraftStudio installed, you can just join the project by clicking this link.

Tags: #LD48 #LD29, craftstudio, ld29, ld48